Share

How to get AMP lightning bolt for my website?

Lightning bolt ⚡is a small icon that appears to left of AMP compatible website on Google. This simple UI enhancement indicates few things that help increase your website traffic:

Site is fast, super-fast, really really fast. The bolt is a leading indicator that your website will load under a second, guaranteed.

In the clutter of Google search results, the bolt's UI enhancement draws eyes and attention towards it. Google, the behemoth, giving a page "special" treatment, means there is something special about this page.

The lightning bolt serves two things from a psychological perspective:

Draws eye balls to your website.

Users feel this website is something special and click it, usually 3 times more than they would click a usual website.

Here are simple steps to get the lightning bolt next to your website.

Build AMP version of your page. The specs are fairly straight forward and can be accessed from the AMP website.

Run the website through the AMP validator to ensure you haven't missed anything. Click here for AMP Validator.

Confirm that you have added the correct AMP discovery tags to canonical and the AMP pages. This ensures that when Google indexes your canonical aka original page, Google will reference the correct AMP page in its index.

And that's it. Your pages will now start receiving the "special" treatment in as little as 2-days. In terms of stats, AMP pages result in following benefits within 5-days:

Average session times increase 60%, because pages load fast, users spend more time reading the content as compared to simply waiting for page to load.

AMP is no brainer, and gives a guaranteed SEO boost. While this steps to make your website AMP compatible are straight forward, the process is fairly complex, so make sure you account for the engineering time as you embark on the AMP journey.